Grocery store 'smart shelves' will target consumers in real-time based on their facial features

Going to the grocery store is about to get a lot more personal: one of the biggest names in food is preparing to launch “smart shelves” to gather intelligence on consumers and customize their shopping experience.

Mondelēz International, the
parent company of Kraft Foods, plans on having their space-age
smart shelves rolled out on supermarket floors sometime in 2015.
And if all goes as planned, soon after the multi-national
corporation behind products such as Chips Ahoy, Oreo, Wheat Thins
and Ritz will begin collecting analytics about impulse buys and
learn new ways to bring customers the products they crave.

The devices — still in development — will rely on high-tech
sensors to snoop in on the facial features of shoppers and
predict roughly their age and sex. From there, a database of
intelligence can be matched in real-time and allow Mondelēz to
make recommendations, offer discounts and practically any other
imaginable option. All, of course, specific to how the company's
data perceives that type of customer.

“Knowing that a consumer is showing interest in the product gives
us the opportunity to engage with them in real-time,” Mondelēz
CIO Mark Dajani told the Wall Street Journal recently.

Speaking to the Journal's Clint Boulton, Dajani described how
customizing what each consumer sees offers an array of new
opportunities to the retailer.

“When people walk by, it’s a missed opportunity,” Dajani told the
paper. “We must know how the consumer behaves in the store.”

And by relying on behavior and not identity, Dajani has had an
easier time than one might imagine distancing the smart shelves
from any sort of surveillance tool that actually identifies its
subjects. Mondelēz's product won't involve cameras at all,
instead prefering sensors to shape together the likely age and
sex, according to the Journal, and matching that information
about what the company already knows.

“The sensors use this data to alert the display to feature
something that a teenage boy is more likely to buy, such as gum
or a chocolate bar,” Boulton wrote. “The shelves also use sensors
based on Microsoft Corp.’s gesture-based Kinect for Windows
technology and if the boy looks at the shelf long enough,
the shelf’s display may play a video targeted for his
demographic.”

Those shelves, he added, will be more than just forward-facing
interfaces to engage the customer. Weights sensors will reveal
when products are picked up, and that information could also
alert the grocer that its time to re-order — or re-think their
inventory.

Boulton reported that the company may consider implementing data
already stored in the enterprise database system it already has,
and said no personally identifiable information will be collected
about any customer caught shopping by the smart shelves' sensors.

The end result, some hope, could be quite lucrative.

Dajani described the smart shelves as just the latest opportunity
to connect another item to the ever-growing “Internet of Things”
concept, essentially paving the way for anything imaginable to be
wired to an information network. RawStory reporter Travis Gettys
drew a correlation between Boulton's article and another recent
story in the Journal about a Gartner Inc. report which determined
the technology being developed for smart shelves and similar
products could generate $1.9 trillion by 2020.